


Mr. MI6

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 19:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Working at Morrell Museum, Q's seen a <i>lot</i> of strange things, but that's nothing compared to the suspicious man who keeps visiting.</p><p>Museum!AU - Q and Eve work at the strangest little museum in London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. MI6

The first time he sees the man—really, honestly _sees_ him, though perhaps “notices” is the better term for it, because Q realizes he’s actually seen him in the room half a dozen times over the course of the eight months he’s been working here at the museum—it’s because Eve is leaning in his ear, whispering .

“Nuh-uh,” he rejoins, the epitome of brilliance, and she rolls her eyes.

“Is so.  Look at the cut of those trousers: Saville Row.  One of his cufflinks could fund this place for a year, I’d bet,” she swears.

And yes, the man is posh.  He’s so minted Q can taste it like toothpaste, a far cry from the average bumbling students with their apologetic eyes as they shove a few quid into the donation box at the door or the tourists who scoff at the notes in the bottom—Q puts them in to encourage people, but all it does is generally lose him a fiver a week—and drop their shiny copper pennies and tuppence like it’s the rubbish bin and they’ve got no idea what to do with all their extra funny money lying around, but Q doesn’t have any idea what the man being rich has anything to do with—“Nuh-uh,” he repeats.

“Is so.  He meets them downstairs in the reading room,” she repeats back.  “The chairs are always moved.”

“Maybe he’s collecting a blowie and doesn’t fancy it in the alley?” Q whispers back.

“Because Lord, don’t I know that eccentric old kooks with weird collections are what does it for me,” Eve agrees wryly. 

“Or he’s SIS,” Q says.

“Or he’s SIS,” Eve confirms.

“Not a guy getting off in a weird place because the china dolls with actual hair wigs rev his engine, but because he’s Military Intelligence,” Q continues.

“Because it’s better if that kind of weirdo is out there on the streets?  And ‘ _rev his engine’_?  Are we on Top Gear?” Eve asks, and no, when she puts it like that….  Q shudders.

“He’s not, though.  Who’s he meeting if he were?”

“Maybe Margery,” Eve says _sotto,_ and it’s nearly unheard under the sound of Q’s snort and shaking laughter at the thought of their mousy boss being a spy.  One of the very serious students shoots them a dirty look, and Q’s of a mind to go tell him that they can all see his forbidden pencil and notepad, anyway, when Eve clutches his shoulder, a distinct case of church giggles caught in her ribcage.  The man’s walking up the stairs; he looks stiff, leans on the railing, but his ice blue eyes are staggeringly sharp as he looks over at them.  Eve won’t stop laughing, so it’s up to Q:

“Thank you for visiting Morrell Museum,” he offers, and he honestly does try to sound professional with Eve clinging to his arm and gasping laughter.  “We do appreciate our return visitors.  Happy to see you again, sir,” he says, and the man’s eyes go wide just a bit before he turns to leave.

And if he thinks about it later, that’s really where it all starts: Q and his big mouth.

::

Morrell Museum is a tiny, antiquated house tucked in the corner of a mews way out in East Finchley, which isn’t exactly far, though it’s far enough from the South Bank and the usual touristy draws of the city central that they’re lucky to get the traffic they do.  Q knows it’s by word of mouth—that’s how he’d found out about it in the first place: Eve’d walked up to him out of the blue one day and asked him did he want to see a pickled lady’s left thumb, and he’d wondered if she’d meant she was drunk and to show him her own, but no, in fact, there’d been a whole human thumb in a pickling jar sitting on the shelf in the subfloor of the strangest museum he’d ever seen.  Dazed, he’d shoved a tenner into the donation slot, and their grand friendship had been born.  Never mind the fact that he hadn’t known her from Adam before she’d dragged him down the rabbit hole—and he’s thankful, really, because it’s the looky-loos who pay the massive rent on his meagre flat.  He can’t even fault them, because months after being suckered into the job—“You’re always here anyway, and I might as well pay the both of you to slack off instead of just the one,” Margery had said briskly, and just like that he was gainfully employed and clutching his little clipboard of random facts about William H. Morrell, no relation to anyone famous by that name that Q has ever heard of.  He’d started in the stained glass room, but when the Pie Iesu’s gore-stricken face and ribs had started giving him nightmares, he’d moved to the library, a fact that Eve would never let him live down but had helped remarkably to calm the panic he’d felt upon seeing strawberries—he was always finding horrifying new sights to try to unsee.

“The Angel,” Eve starts in again as he drops his bag by the bench where she has her sandwich.  “The Angel with Jacob humping its Holy leg like a schnauzer—”

“Pickled uterus,” he says back, and it says something morbid about them both that Eve just picks a chunk of chicken from her sandwich to throw to the birds that are eyeing them up now.  Even a few months ago, she’d have shuddered; half a year and it would have put him off his lunch to even think the words, but he watches the birds pick at their baked and sliced brethren with mild interest.  “You shouldn’t feed them to themselves.  You’ll give them scrapie.”

“Mad pigeon,” she agrees, picking at the sweet corn before flicking it off.

“You’ll start the zombie apocalypse,” he warns and she shrugs, biting into her sandwich to show how little she cares.  “It’ll matter to you when—”

“He’s watching you,” she says around the mouthful of her sandwich, and when he glances over at her her eyes are sly, darting toward a bench on the other side of the green.  “Don’t look!”

“You can’t tell me a bloke is watching me and then tell me not to look!  What kind of wingman are you?  Is he fit, at least?”  He’s just a little bit used to her carrying on like this, and it doesn’t faze him; she could be talking about a dog.  It’s a thing that she does.

“Well fit,” she offers, and he flits his eyes up to look through his lashes.  Mr. MI6 is there, casually reading a paper. 

“Christ, he _is_ a spy,” Q says low.  The man’s reading the Daily Mail as if he cares about whether Beyoncé really takes four hours to do her makeup—and Q’d only read the article cover to cover himself because it had been left in the cloakroom for three days and there are only so many paintings of fishing boats he can stare at before he goes barmy—as if things like masculinity and pride don’t matter to the SIS.  They probably don’t.

“Now you believe me?” Eve hisses behind her sandwich, and Q is beginning to doubt the validity of the sandwich as a cover when she’s holding it up like a smile over her mouth and keeps looking at the man.

“No.  He’s probably from the neighborhood and likes to stop in now and again.  Stop being ridiculous.”

“Local to East Finchley,” Eve repeats, dubious.

“Maybe he knows no one in their right mind goes anywhere near Morrell Museum and goes there for privacy.”

“To spank it to the creepy death dolls, you mean.”

Q winces; across the green, the man turns the page with calculated slowness.  “Eve.”

“You’re the one who suggested it the other day,” she says innocently.

“You push the bounds of moral propriety.”

“I do try.  So zombie pigeons.”

“Zombie pigeons,” he agrees.  The man watches them eat for half an hour, but when it’s time for them to leave, Q notices he’s mysteriously absent.

::

He’s back again, Mr. MI6.  Clad in a dark bespoke suit that highlights the rugged masculinity of his crag of a face, he looks like a particular sort of wet dream Q’d had for a brief, confusing time as a teen when he’d thought that all queer men were meant to know ridiculous amounts about fashion.  He’d come out of the whole thing resolute in the knowledge that one should never wear mauve if one’s skin tone couldn’t support it—and that many skin tones couldn’t—and suddenly aware that he dressed like an art student who’d been taken on a spending spree at the charity shop, but he hadn’t been arsed to care much; now he tugs his cardigan low over his hips and tries to disguise the fact that he’s wearing trousers with an obscenely skinny cut and a tuxedo stripe in satin.  Mr. MI6 has that effect.  Q watches at least three of the students shrink into their tatty anoraks as Mr. MI6 heads downstairs to the reading room looking every bit a glossy centerfold.  Q takes the steps by threes on his way to the anatomy collection.

“He’s back again.  Someone should see what he’s doing down there,” he tells Eve as he walks in.  A tourist blinks owlishly at him, and he stares back until she turns to the painting she’d been looking at.  It’s one of his favorites: a beautiful pointillist work depicting the Passion of Christ, of course presided over by the hyperrealistic eye and hand of God; he and Eve have taken to calling it ‘What is the Bloody Point?’ when Margery isn’t around to hear them.  It’s not the strangest thing Morrell had.

“Might be a matter of national importance,” Eve agrees.

“Bags not it,” Q says and she laughs.

“Oh, how sweet that you still think that will work on me,” she says, and if he weren’t holding on to the rail he suspects she’d have shoved him down the stairs.

It is, perhaps, just Q’s imagination that the Mission Impossible theme begins to play as he steps off the lower landing into the hall.  To the left is the Little Chapel, a full confection of stone and stained glass that somehow manages to come across as haunting and as a man’s masturbatory fantasy of a bygone time; there’s a witch-dunking bale in the corner.  Q has no idea if it’s genuine.  To the right….  Q nudges the door to the reading room with his toe and peers in around the corner.  It’s not supposed to be closed—part of the draw of the reading room is the beautiful inlaid wood on the back of the door and the green bottle glass bookshelf doors that are visible from the hall—and he leans closer, listening at the gap as unobtrusively as he can.

“Looking for someone?”  The voice is dark and heady as whisky, and Q’s knees nearly go to jelly because he knows without turning around that it’s Mr. MI6 behind him.  He gives himself a count of three to turn—anything longer would be noticeably odd—and manages it in seven, brows creeping into an apologetic purse as he takes in the man.

Broad shoulders.  Mr. MI6 is very attractive up close, with short, cropped blond hair and those same sharp eyes that are fixed on Q’s face.  “Just,” Q tries, but his lips don’t want to work.  He manages a smile and starts again.  “Just checking up on the reading room.  We’ve had some instances of vandalism in there, so now we pop in from time to time to make sure it’s okay.”  Mr. MI6 gives him a smile that’s little more than a twitch of his lips.

“Someone bothering the china dolls,” he asks, except oh, no, it’s not really a question, and Q flushes from head to toe, even though he knows Mr. MI6 isn’t referring to his conversation with Eve.  Because he’s not MI6, he’s just a very wealthy man patronizing a small, struggling museum.

“Something like that,” Q mumbles.  “Don’t let me disturb you.” 

He’s about to slink back up the stairs to Eve when Mr. MI6 calls out, “What’s your name?”

“Q.”  He’s not sure why he answers, but he gets that twitch again for his efforts. 

“Nice to see you again, Q,” Mr. MI6 says, pushing open the door to the reading room and stepping inside.

::

“I’ve changed my mind,” Eve announces loudly.  Half the bench looks down at them; Q buries his face in his bowl of noodles and pretends not to notice the crazy lady who’s just so happened to sit down across from him.  “Don’t you want to hear what I’ve changed my mind about?”

Through a mouthful of curry noodles, Q says, “No.”  His point is confirmed with an emphatic wave of the wooden spoon in his hand, and the woman next to him ducks away with a glare.  “Sorry,” he tells her, then turns back to Eve.  “No.”

“It’s Mr. MI6.”

“Where?”  Panic burbles in Q’s chest.  He hasn’t mentioned—well, he’d mentioned once or twice, but not nearly all of the times—but he’s been seeing the man…frequently.  Out of the corner of his eye, while he’s out to lunch or on the tube, even once when he’d been shopping for Eve’s birthday present in the crowds on Oxford Street, though he obviously never mentioned that one because Eve was _uncanny_ , and mentioning shopping at Oxford Street would lead to her guessing her present and would mean he’d have to buy another, as presents should always be a surprise.  Eve pins him with a look.

“That just confirms it,” she says, satisfied.

“Confirms what?”

“That he’s not MI6.  Or, well, he might be, but that’s not why he keeps coming to the museum,” she says, and Q blinks into his bowl, fishing out a mushroom to chew on while he tries to follow her train of thought.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” he says finally.  She grins and steals a radish from his bowl of pickles, waggling her eyebrows suggestively.

“He _likes_ you,” she says, and then immediately fills her mouth so he can’t interrogate her properly, leaving him sputtering.

“What!”

“He does.  He’s following you around because he likes you.  It only makes sense.”

“Makes sense,” he says faintly.  His whole face is bright red. 

“Mm,” she hums, her face still wicked with knowledge.

“How does it make sense?” he demands.  Eve hums again, and he’s about to start applying his chopsticks in a very unpleasant way when someone takes the seat abandoned by the woman he’d splashed.  He shuffles over, still focused on Eve, and when a familiar, deep voice says, “Ta,” to the waitress Q feels like his eyes are going to fall out.

“It makes sense,” Eve tells him sweetly and turns back to her ramen.

“My name is Bond,” Mr. MI6 whispers conspiratorially.  “James Bond.”

“Oh,” Q replies faintly.

“I forgot to tell you that when I asked your name the other day,” Mr. Bond continues.  The waitress comes by to scribble his order on the placemat and he thanks her, turning back to Q with that same lip twitch.

“You,” Q starts, fishing for an opening line, “come to the museum a lot, Mr. Bond,” he finishes lamely.  He’d kick himself for being such a loser, but Mr. Bond just smiles again.

“Lots of interesting things to look at,” he says, and oh, Q kind of hopes Eve’s right.

::

After that, Mr. Bond comes to the museum often.  Perhaps twice a month, he stops in to lean on the walls and flirt outrageously; Q’s developed a Pavlovian blush when he hears the man’s voice down the hall.  Margery catches them at it once and tuts at him for a week about touching the wallpaper.  Mr. Bond is an importer, rich as Croesus and possessed of a dry humour that positively zings with Q’s own.  It doesn’t help that Eve makes herself scarce when he comes around, and Q finds himself trailing around behind Mr. Bond like a puppy, filling him in with facts from his clipboard.

“It’s appalling,” Mr. Bond says, and it is, a bit.  Q looks at the shadow box of preserved bunnies reenacting Da Vinci’s Last Supper.  It’s obviously a copy, perhaps even an amateur’s attempt, and the bunnies’ mouldering ears look ready to drop from their heads.

“It’s supposed to be sweet.  He kept it in his daughter’s room,” Q says.  “Her name was Ethelfried.” 

“Some parents hate their children,” Mr. Bond acknowledges.

“Family was very important to Mr. Morrell.  It’s why he kept them.”

“Kept?” Mr. Bond asks, and Q grins.

“In the anatomy room.”  Mr. Bond goes a bit green at that, and Q laughs.  “You get used to it.  He was a harmless old crackpot, but if he hadn’t been prone to collecting these oddities, we might never have met.”  It’s the closest he’s come to expressing appreciation for Mr. Bond, and he can feel himself blushing again.  Mr. Bond’s hand brushes his where he’s clutching the clipboard; his smile is disarming.

“I’d imagine we would have somehow.”

Upstairs, Eve meets them at the cloakroom, long red nails drumming on the donations box.  “Lovely to see you again, Mr. Bond.  We miss you when you’re gone,” she says, expression sly.  She’s not quite subtle with her insinuations, but Q holds no illusion that she’s meant to be.

“Eve,” Mr. Bond greets.

“You never donate,” she responds.  Q sinks his face into his palms, or tries to and ends up smacking himself with the clipboard.  Mr. Bond touches his arm and Eve continues, “One might begin to wonder whether you care if Morrell Museum stays open.”

There’s a stalemate; Q can’t see it because he’s buried in the clipboard, but Mr. Bond touches his arm again and he mumbles out a muffled, “Thank you for visiting Morrell House.”  He can hear Mr. Bond’s smile, and when he looks up there’s a frankly criminal wad of cash in the box, crisp twenty pound notes sitting folded on the bottom of the box.  At least three, probably five, and Eve looks the cat who’s got the canary.  Mr. Bond has gone, and Eve sidles in close, looping her arm around his waist.

“You’ll be his kept man,” she tells him, rocking him gently in his mortification.  “And he’ll put you up in a flat in Mayfair.”

“I hate you,” he tells her viciously.

::

“So computers,” Eve starts.  They’re people-watching in Piccadilly Circus because the museum is closed today, and she interrupts herself to discreetly point at a tourist who’s being stalked by a pickpocket.  Q throws his crust for the birds and they watch the man lift the tourist’s wallet; he pats his own bag and tugs it closer.

“Studied them in school,” Q confirms.  “What about them?”

“It’s just I’d imagined you a right little mad scientist,” she says, and when he glances over, she’s primping in her compact. 

“Oh, I was,” he agrees genially.  “Robotics and engineering and inventing—I spent so much time trying to invent the Daleks it’s a wonder I had time to never date, ever, because I was a pasty-faced tosser.  Never did figure out why a plunger, though.”

“Because the BBC had twenty pounds to its name and that only buys you so much bubble wrap, I suppose,” Eve says.

“True.  But why do you ask?  Did you need some help on your home computer?  Download a nasty virus?”

“Something like that,” she hums.

“It’s the interspecies pornography,” he tells her.  She cackles, and the pickpocket gives them a wide berth, heading for quieter hunting grounds.  “He’ll be picked up in just a moment.”

“Soon as he leaves the crowds, I’d imagine,” Eve agrees.  “There’s cameras everywhere.”

“Can’t escape the British government,” Q says.

“No.”

::

The reading room’s been broken into, all of the bottle glass doors shattered and splintered, the books strewn and shredded.  It puts an honest-to-god lump in Q’s chest to see the destruction.  He supposes he’s fonder of the place than he’d realized.  They’re standing on the street while the police are inside when Mr. Bond comes up.  It’s raining.

“Something the matter?” Mr. Bond asks.

“Vandalism,” Q manages, short and clipped.

“In the reading room?”  And for a moment Q starts, then recalls the conversation they’d had at the bottom of the steps.  He nods, feeling sick.

“It’s my fault,” he says.  Mr. Bond brushes the wet curls from his forehead. 

“Did you leave the door unlocked?”

“No,” Q says, and how can he explain that this happened because he’d somehow spoken it into being?  Eve squeezes his hand.

“Do the police need to speak to you?” Mr. Bond asks, and Q shakes his head mutely.  “Then come on.  I’ll take you for a coffee and you can warm up.”  He bundles Q under his arm, the umbrella covering them both, and Eve waves.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” she calls, teasing.

“So that pretty much only forbids arson,” Q retorts.

“Wouldn’t catch in this wet, anyway,” Eve agrees.

They end up in a Costa that’s across from a Pret and down the way from a Starbucks; Q watches no fewer than four people wander between the three and marvels at the thought of a place that needs three coffee shops so close to each other, much less the idea that more than one person could walk out of a coffee shop and realize they desperately needed a coffee within the next twenty paces.  Mr. Bond watches him watch the people with an amused look on his face, and Q has the grace to blush when he notices his fond expression.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

“It’s my pleasure, Q.  I’ve come to be quite fond of the museum over the last few months,” Mr. Bond tells him, and Q fights back that ever-present blush. 

“Lots of interesting things to see there,” he says, echoing Mr. Bond’s earlier comment, and he knows it’s recognized in Mr. Bond’s smile and the way his eyes crinkle at the corners.  He makes his mind up.  “So I’m just going to come right out and say it, because otherwise I’ll make a big tit of myself, but I find you very attractive, Mr. Bond,” he blurts out.

“I’d hoped you did,” Mr. Bond says agreeably, cupping Q’s hand in his own.  It’s absolutely thrilling.

::

“ _What_.”  Eve sounds nothing so like an angry cat growling, and honestly, he’s a bit confused.  The phone slips a little in his sweaty hand.

“I thought you—” Q says, flustered.  He’d thought she’d be happy, he wants to say.  He’d thought she’d encouraged him. 

“You can’t _see_ James Bond,” she snaps over the line.  “It’s not—”

“Eve, how many men have shown interest in me since we’ve first met?” he asks.  “None.”

“More than you’ve noticed, Boffin,” she says fondly.

“None,” he tells her firmly.  “And you’ve known me a year now.  I am aware that I am a highly specialized interest—” he cuts off her sound of protest, “—and I’ve resigned myself to that.  But he’s sweet and he’s kind and he’s _gorgeous_ , and men like James Bond don’t happen to men like me.  They just don’t.”

“He’s _dangerous_ —”

“Eve.”  It’s time to stop playing this game.  “The MI6 thing was just a joke.  He’s an importer, foreign antiquities.  There’s nothing dangerous about rooting through other people’s junk and bringing it back to auction.”

“When I find out what his game is…,” she grumbles, and he’s not going to make any head way with her.

“Please just be happy for me.  Please, please.  Please just be happy for me, Eve.  You’re my best friend.  I rushed back to tell you first; I haven’t even called my mum!”

“Don’t tell your mum about James Bond,” she warns.

“Well, I wouldn’t.  I mean, she’s still holding out hope I’ll meet a nice girl and get over this phase, but Eve, I didn’t think you’d be….”  And damn, but that’s tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.

Eve sighs.  He can hear her shoulders drooping as she caves.  “Just.  Be careful, please?  For me?”

“Always.”

::

“We’ll be closing at the end of the month,” Margery says around her hankie.  Her eyes are rimmed red, and even though he’d known it was coming, there’s no missing the sinking feeling in his stomach.  Morrell Museum can’t afford the repairs, can barely afford its upkeep after the days closed.  Margery’s already begun the painstaking process of cataloguing the displays for sale to other museums, but he imagines many will turn up in charity shops and even a few in the rubbish bins, Mr. Morrell’s legacy reduced to so much clutter and nonsense.  They’ll be on for the rest of the month to help catalogue, but after that Q’s going to have to find a new way to pay his bills.

“I’d love you as a roommate, darling,” Eve says softly, curling her arms around his neck as they sway in shock.  “I just can’t.  There’s things around my flat you haven’t got security clearance to see.”

“What will I do?” he asks bleakly.

“Things have a way of turning out.  I think you’re ready for this to happen, even if you don’t think so.”

“Ready to be homeless?”

“Ready to move on to the next stage.”

::

James takes him on a walk a few days after, once he’s had the heart to tell him the news.  He looks genuinely saddened by the museum’s pending closure, which Q finds charming; then again, these days he finds James charming all the time.  He’s holding James’s hand and reveling in the fact that they can when James stops him.

“Do you have any idea what you’ll do next?”

Q sighs, leaning into his shoulder.  “Not even the foggiest,” he confesses.  “Lose my flat, for one thing.  Go home to mum?”

“What if I said you had other options?”

Q peers at him then, wincing into the strong sunlight to try to make out James’s features.  It’s no use; his face is unreadable.  “I don’t know what you mean.”  James takes his hand, leading him up the street to the bridge, but he’s silent, staring across the way at the impressive SIS building morosely.  The sight makes Q’s stomach turn.  “Did you know,” he says, chuckling softly, “that before we first met, Eve and I used to think you were SIS?  Or, really, Eve used to joke that you were MI6, coming to the museum to do cold drops.”

James’s smile is thin, his hands hot on Q’s waist when he leans him against the concrete to kiss into his mouth.  “I find you,” he murmurs, “terribly sweet.”

“I’ll miss you if I have to go,” Q confesses.

“You won’t have to go,” James tells him, drawing away.  His fingers curl around Q’s.

“I can’t stay.  Not without a job.”

Something hard and fleeting passes over James’s face at that before he melts into Q again.  “I’ll pay for you to stay in London.  I don’t—I’m paid very well, and I don’t use it on anything.  I don’t ever buy anything.”

It’s a bit like a slap.  “I’m not to be bought, James!” Q says sharply, tugging back, but James pulls him in closer, mouth already remorseful on his.

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean—I just.  You don’t have to take it; they’ll offer—” he cuts himself off, kissing high along the ridge of Q’s cheekbone.  “Don’t feel obligated.”

He can’t get any more from James, just kisses that feel like apologies.

::

“I think,” Q says carefully as he and Eve climb the steps to the museum.  He’s had time to think about it, time to consider, and while there are dozens of questions spinning in his mind now, they’re beginning to crystalize: “You were right.  About James.”

“Oh, darling,” Eve cries, stopping at once.  “Are you okay?  Do you need ice cream and a girls’ night?”

“What?”  He blinks.  When it hits him that she thinks they’ve broken up, he’s torn between irritation and amusement, and the laugh that comes out is tense.  “No.  I mean, I think you were right.  At first.  When we first met him—before.  I think he’s—”

And the humour drops from Eve’s eyes; she holds up a hand to stop him and tugs him the rest of the way up the stairs into the building.  Margery is in the office shuffling papers, and Eve pushes him in front of the desk.  “Now.  Say it now.”

“I don’t want to talk about my boyfriend in front of Margery!” he splutters.  “No offense, Margery.”

“Boyfriend?” Margery asks, tipping her head in the daffy way she does when she doesn’t understand.  Eve glares at her.

“James Bond.” 

“Oh?”  Margery’s voice is strange.  “Who’s that, dear?”

“My boyfriend?” Q says, unsure.

“Must be some mistake,” Margery says, but her fingertips are tight around her pen.  “I’m sure I don’t know who that is.”

“Say it, Q.  Just say the words you were going to say outside, and this will all make so much more sense in a few minutes,” Eve tells him.

“I think you were right?  About James,” he repeats, and as he speaks, it doesn’t take a few minutes for him to understand.  No, instead it hits him all at once, in a horrible, sickening rush as he remembers Eve’s hand on his wrist inviting him into the museum for the first time, remembers Margery’s watery, absentminded smile and the way she was always exactly where she needed to be, remembers seeing James in the building and searches his memory for other visitors, the pretty girls who’d flirted with him when he’d first started and then the handsome student from Prague who’d visited daily for a week, remembers laughing with Eve—“Who’s he meeting if he were?”, if he were SIS, if he were MI6, who was James here to see?—and feels foolish right down to the soles of his shoes.  “Eve,” he says desperately, and she takes his hand in both of hers, smiling sadly.

“Thank god,” Margery says finally, breaking the silence with a crisp laugh.  “Thank _god_.  It’s been nearly four years of deep cover, you know.  You’d better be worth it—but I know you will be; I’ve given you very high marks, myself.”

“ _Eve_ ,” he says again.

“Had to feel you out somehow, you know.  You didn’t follow the path we were expecting.  No interest in the military, didn’t pursue engineering in school and didn’t follow up on your doctorate.  You still do it in your down time, don’t you?  Create things,” Eve prompts encouragingly.

“Yes.”

“But that’s not the real question here, is it, Quinton?” Margery asks, and Q turns to her, amazed by the change in her.  Without her molelike squint, without the hunched shoulders, she looks ten years younger, a completely different person.  He realizes with a start he’d have some difficulty picking her out of a crowd now, almost certainly wouldn’t recognize her as his boss of the past year.  “The real question is are you going to take the job?”

“Job?”

“It’s a lower-end position, just for now,” Eve tells him, squeezing his hand in excitement.  “Technical Services, with an emphasis in guiding the field agents.  Several of them have been by to meet you already, and they all adore you.”

“So this has been a job interview?” he wonders.  “A year-long job interview?”

“For you it’s been a year,” Margery interjects.  “There were two before you that failed almost immediately; you were near to failing, yourself, though Bond’s presence brought you back on course.  You should thank him.”

And that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it?  James had leaned him against the wall and kissed him, had twined his fingers in his hair and whispered sweet words, and it had all been a bloody _job interview_.  “For pretending to be my boyfriend?” Q asks, and his voice wobbles more than he’d wanted it to.  “I should thank him?”

“Q—”  Eve brushes his sleeve with her fingertips.

“Don’t make a scene.  Do you want the position or not?” Margery asks.  Her cool voice is calming and he nods, curling into himself.  “Good.  Take the rest of the day off and come back tomorrow.”

::

He cries.  Of course he does.  He beats his pillows and turns off his phone and smokes half a pack of cigarettes before throwing the rest out, then goes down to the corner store for more and ends up with a bottle of whisky that sits baleful on his coffee table as he watches it.  And then the next morning he gets up, puts away the unopened bottle, dresses in the clothes he’s worn nearly every day for the last few months, and goes to work.

MI6 is, in a lot of ways, just like any other job: the first day is paperwork, photos, fingerprints, and meeting his new coworkers.  He hits it off well, but it’s all still a little bit overwhelming; he eats his lunch in the stairwell because he’s still feeling raw and it turns out that Eve Moneypenny is actually someone quite high in the recruitment team, already working on pulling in more of the best and brightest that Britain has to offer, though she takes the time to stop by and wish him luck.  It turns out that James—Mr. Bond; Mr. MI6; and Q’s head swims because he doesn’t know what to call this man anymore—is on a mission abroad; it’s a relief because he doesn’t know what he’d do if he ran into him now, and it’s agony because he doesn’t know what he’d do.  He feels dizzy, but as the days pass he adjusts, observes the missions and works with the head of Technical Services to develop and improve the tools they’re sending into the field with their agents.

And then James Bond shows up.

“Leave me alone,” Q mutters, shying away from Bond’s proprietary hand on his hip.

“I didn’t want you to be hurt,” Bond says, and it’s his soft tone more than his words that hurt, that feel like Bond has plucked out his heart.

“Then you shouldn’t have lied.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“You did.”

“When did I lie?” Bond asks, and he has no right to sound this calm, this placating, when Q’s this upset.  They’re in the hall where anyone could come by and see, but there’s one thing to be said about spies: they have excellent timing.  Q turns away and Bond catches his jaw.  “When did I lie?”

“You were MI6—”

“And you knew that from the beginning.  Eve told you.”

“—and all of those times you were going overseas for work—”

“Five tends to get snippy if we handle the jobs here at home for them,” Bond says with a quiet laugh.

“—and when you said that you _liked_ me,” Q finishes with a breath that makes his chest ache.

“Q.”  He won’t look, he won’t—Bond’s hands curl around him, pulling him in closer.  “Never.  Never, ever was I being more truthful than then.”

“How do I trust you?” Q asks.  

“I’ll swear on it.”

“Swear?  On Queen and Country?”

Bond’s scoff in his ear is close and affectionate.  “Of course not.”

“What, then?”

“Something important,” Bond murmurs, and Q hums, already giving in despite himself. 

“Just forgive him already so we can stop pretending you’re not fraternizing in the middle of the hallway and go about our jobs!” calls a voice that sounds suspiciously like Eve.  Q laughs, hiccoughing into Bond’s chest.

“What about the two-headed goat?” Bond suggests, and Q laughs. 

“Okay.  On the two-headed goat.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is, in many ways, the sum of my recent trip to London. I won't dare say it's an accurate portrayal of the city, only that it's similar in many ways to the side of the city I saw while I was there. There are many places in the fic that are, of course, real places, but alas, Morrell Museum is not--it's very, very loosely interpreted from several small museums dotted around the city and of course exaggerated for fun. More importantly, this is not at all intended to accurately portray SIS recruitment procedures.


End file.
